Creek Freak’s Top Stories of 2011

It’s Jessica here, summarizing the thoughts of the bloggers Joe, Jane, Josh and myself about our biggest stories of 2011.

But first, I want to take a moment to note that on a personal level, 2011 marked my decade as a Creek Freak. In 2000 I’d begun mapping LA’s waterways, but it wasn’t until I, with a team of three other landscape architecture graduate students, had completed Seeking Streams that I realized I’d been hooked by the desire to bring buried waterways back to the surface of LA. It’s been a decade of ideas & argument, at times petty politics, and for me, standing on the outside of bureaucracies with the power to restore our landscapes, feeling like I was staring up from the base of Hoover Dam. But on the other side of that wall are gradual changes in watershed management, still rooted in a philosophy of nature control, but testing how controlled habitats can be better managed alongside more traditional engineered structures and approaches. I’m still waiting for that leap to working with natural processes – treating the flood channels like the streams they were. It will happen someday. But the fight has been good for me too, it forced me to hone my understanding of how streams function, to understand the genesis of undesirable flooding and erosion, to better relate the role of waterways within an ecosystem. Our ecosystem.

I believe restoration and protection of waterways happens in places like Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Austin because the waterways supply their water (or are the early-warning system of their aquifer) and because enough people understand ecology and have some experience and appreciation of natural processes in their lives to demand restoration and protection. A version of the Boulder story I read once stated that they ran the Army Corps out of town when the Corps came offering channelization. A citizen-led initiative led to building restrictions over Austin’s aquifer recharge zones, and citizens informed the planning processes in Seattle and Portland that wrapped endangered species recovery in a package with Clean Water Act water quality commitments. In LA, we mostly defer to experts. We eschew big ideas unless someone from higher up the political hierarchy proposes it. We sigh at the tangle of bureaucracy that makes it phenomenally difficult (and expensive) to get even a small plot of land planted, a bit of roadway striped for bicycles – something that definitely succeeds in keeping us focused on the short-term. And we fight. We fight opportunism of a few powerful people er, corporations, who profit by threatening our community dreams, something that also keeps us focused on the short-term, on triage. (As members of our community, these “people,” er corporations, should share our vision. Which vision, you ask? Good point.) And we fight each other. If we have a common vision, and I’m not sure that we do, it lacks ecosystem function.

Let’s celebrate our steps towards sustainability, but with a solid vision that includes the regeneration of our degraded riparian ecosystems. May our steps be clearly towards support of our incredible natural heritage, the biodiversity that supports us.

And with that… our top 10 stories of 2011.

Victories

Legal permitted kayaking jobs on the yes-of-course-navigable Los Angeles River

I’ve mentioned it before… and huge props again to George Wolfe for showing me this… but we treat the river the way we picture it in our heads, in our stories. If our mental image of the L.A. is a godforsaken grey concrete canyon, then we’re unlikely to invest in it. If our mental image of the river is a place where there are boats and birds and fish and trees and bikes and… jobs! … well, then, of course, it’s worth protecting and investing in.

Construction to enhance the creeklet in North Atwater Park is well underway – we should see a ribbon cutting early in 2012! It’s already being tested by rain. We’ll call this one a victory even though the project was part of a legal settlement…and the creeklet was already in a natural channel even though it is not a historical waterway. What it will do is offer us a vision for more naturalized creeks in city of LA parks – an important step towards increasing our collective appreciation of our local ecosystems and understanding options for coexisting with them. I’ve also been working on the planning phases of two creek restoration projects that, depending on what phase they’re at, we may be able to write about in 2012.

Thought-Provoking for Water Geeks

Why it is reasonable (and important) to rethink Los Angeles as a place that provides its own drinking water, and inspiring historical landscapes of aquifer recharge, of springs and streams were also given artistic expression at the Huntington this year.

Courts threw out the lawsuit against the planned Malibu Lagoon restoration. Why do I call this thought-provoking instead of a victory? Mainly because it provoked a firestorm of comments, one of the demonstrations that we don’t have a common vision or understanding of ecological processes.

An immediate threat to a cohesive Los Angeles River vision is embodied by the development option of the “person” known as Trammel Crow, who could take the Rio out of Rio de Los Angeles State Park. Or ransom it back to us.

Arcadia's oak woodlands, gone but not forgotten. Photo by ecotonestudios

I wish for more aquatic adventures than ever this new year for all of us
waterways fans. This is a special “niche” blog that I for one really appreciate. It deserves a far bigger audience. May that come also!